Field of the Various Embodiments
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to assemblies that include light emitting elements and, more specifically, to techniques for automatically identifying and localizing wireless light emitting elements.
Description of the Related Art
Whether at live concerts, at parties, or at home, the experience of listening to music is often enhanced when accompanied by a display of colored lights in shifting patterns. Such displays of colored lights are typically referred to as light shows. The physical structures housing the colored lights used in light shows typically include a lighting system with a lighting substrate composed of a rigid or flexible material, on or in which the multiple individual light emitting elements are either mounted or embedded. The lighting substrate may be composed of an acoustically transparent or translucent material, where sound waves transmitted by the loudspeaker are able to pass through the lighting substrate with relatively low attenuation. In such cases, the lighting substrate may be placed in front of a loudspeaker. Each of the light emitting elements is wired, via a wiring harness, to a particular location on a controller. The controller individually controls the color and intensity of each mounted light emitting element to generate various shifting patterns. The controller produces various lighting effects by controlling and synchronizing the timing of color and intensity changes by transmitting signals to each of the individual light emitting elements via the wiring harness.
One drawback of having wired light emitting elements is that the material and labor costs for wiring each individual light emitting element to the controller can be significant relative to the cost of the overall lighting system. For example, the material and labor costs include the cost of the wire harness between each of the light emitting elements and the controller and the costs to place and route each wire harness between a particular light emitting element and a particular corresponding location on the controller. Another drawback of having wired light emitting elements is that the wiring harnesses provide an acoustic barrier that can prevent sound waves from efficiently passing through areas of the lighting substrate covered by the wiring harnesses. In applications where the lighting system is placed in front of one or more speakers, the wiring harnesses may attenuate or reflect sound waves transmitted by the speakers, thereby decreasing the effective volume of the speakers.
One possible solution to the above problems is to place wireless light emitting elements on the lighting substrate. Wireless light emitting elements are configured to receive control information and power wirelessly, thereby removing the need for a wire harness. In such an implementation, each wireless light emitting element is associated with a different identifier (ID). To generate different shifting light patterns, the controller controls the timing of the color and intensity for each light emitting element by transmitting control messages to the different light emitting elements. Each of those control messages identifies a particular target light emitting element via the ID.
One drawback of the above solution is that the IDs for the individual light emitting elements are usually unknown before the lighting substrate is assembled into the lighting system. In fact, during assembly, a machine typically picks the light emitting elements randomly from a pool of available light emitting elements, without regard to the IDs of the selected light emitting elements, and places the light emitting elements onto or embeds the light emitting elements into the lighting substrate. Consequently, during or after the lighting system is assembled, the ID of each light emitting element has to be manually recorded along with the corresponding position of each light emitting element on the lighting substrate. The resulting mapping between light emitting element IDs and corresponding positions is then manually programmed into the controller. The manual process of recording the mapping and programming the mapping into the controller can be labor intensive and error prone. Further, if one or more light emitting elements included in a given lighting system need to be replaced during operation, the same manual techniques described above must be followed, thereby increasing overall maintenance costs.
As the foregoing illustrates, more effective ways for identifying and localizing wireless light emitting elements included in lighting systems would be useful.